Why the rape scene in this week's 'Handmaid's Tale' was so different — and why that matters

By Kate Feldman

Jun 21, 2018 | 12:00 AM

Offred goes into false labor in "The Last Ceremony." (George Kraychyk / Hulu)

Spoilers ahead for Season 2, Episode 10

Gilead is built on rape. It’s the governing policy, the structure, the code. It’s systematic. Every month, the handmaid is raped. Every month, she lies back between a wife’s opened legs, spreads her own and dissociates while her commander thrusts and groans to completion.

“The Last Ceremony” ramps up in the grocery store when Offred (Elisabeth Moss) goes into labor. The handmaids and the wives go into overdrive to prepare for the ceremony; the infertile downstairs with candles, a harpist and Lamaze breathing and the imprisoned upstairs, doing the actual work. Like the ritualistic monthly rapes, labor, too, is by design.

Except this time, there’s a hitch: Offred is in false labor. It’s not time yet.

Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski), who has grown sick of having Offred underfoot at all times, wants the pregnancy done. The sooner the handmaid gives birth, the sooner she leaves. Humiliated by Aunt Lydia — “You might consider timing the contractions next time” — Serena asks about chemically inducing labor. But Offred’s high-risk birth makes that too risky, so instead, they try “the most natural way.” By sex.

Sex in Gilead isn’t sex. It’s rape.

“Offred is out of practice,” Yahlin Chang, who wrote the episode, told the Daily News. “She has not had to dissociate in a long time. In this scene, she just doesn’t do them the favor of successfully dissociating before the rape begins.”

It’s a stark difference between the rape of Emily (Alexis Bledel) that opens the episode, the same she and the other handmaids go through monthly.

“You treat it like a job,” she says as her commander unzips. “An unpleasant job to be gotten through as fast as possible. Kissing is forbidden. This makes it bearable. One detaches oneself. One describes. An act of copulation, fertilization, perhaps. No more to you than a bee is to a flower. You steel yourself. You pretend not to be present. Not in the flesh. You leave your body.”

Offred doesn’t have time to do that, not with Serena Joy holding her down. She hasn’t been raped since she got pregnant. She doesn’t remember how. So she screams and she cries. She begs Commander Waterford to stop. He doesn’t. And the camera stays panned on her, motionless, as the husband and wife leave the room. Their work is done.

“They’ve never had a ceremony go that way. They’ve been so brainwashed that her resistance doesn’t make much sense,” Chang told The News.

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Where shows like “Game of Thrones” and “Westworld” have been criticized for their egregious, seemingly unnecessary violence against women, the “Handmaid’s Tale” rapes serve a purpose. They are, after all, the only way Gilead survives. So Chang knew she had to show the assault.

“The premise of the show is that the handmaids are subjected to ritual rape,” she said. “It’s not at all gratuitous or exploitative in any way…it’s integral to the fabric of this dystopian universe. It’s not fun or titillating or done for sensationalism.”

This, like the episode title suggests, is the last ceremony. The last rape. But for her trouble, Commander Waterford (Joseph Fiennes) gives Offred her last wish: to see her daughter.

“You deserve this,” he tells her as Nick shuffles her into his car. Later, as Nick is being kidnapped, his message sounds like a threat — Chang told The News the Commander, who’s “like an abusive husband who brutalizes his wife and then gives her a diamond bracelet the next day,” really did mean it as a kind gesture — but for now, Offred gets to see Hannah.

It’s a heartbreaking scene, as the once and future mother reunites with a daughter who jumps away at first. Hannah is Alice now; she has a new life.

But the reunion, which Chang wrote late last year, has terrifying significance today that she wishes weren’t real. Like June and Hannah, more than 2,000 children have been separated from their families as they attempt to cross the border into the United States by President Trump’s zero tolerance policy toward immigration. The timing is a complete coincidence, but the plot, like much of the Hulu show as a whole, finds itself on the same timeline as reality.

“When I was writing the scene in November and December, I talked to a UN expert about what happens in those other countries far away and overseas where parents and children are brutally torn apart by the government,” she told The News. “At the time, we were imagining something for this completely fictional country.”

Chang spoke to child psychologists and therapists, too, trying to get inside the head of a young girl who had been ripped away from her mother. She thought about how her own children, 12, 9 and 7 years old, would react. She wrote about how Hannah would remember the last time she saw June, as she was being knocked out and taken away. She wrote about the worry.

“These mother-child reunions very rarely go the way the mom fantasizes it will go. The child has anger, resentment, confusion. The mother expects it to be hugs and kisses and joy,” Chang told The News.

“June has been brought so low before this scene. She’s just gone through the rape, she’s out of her mind, she’s gone through the most horrible thing in her world, and she’s still able to become a mother immediately upon seeing Hannah. It’s an amazing testament to her resilience and her strength and the resilience of the human spirit.”

In just a few short minutes, June and Hannah reconcile. The mother imparts the few pieces of wisdom she hadn’t thought to share before Gilead. The child assures her that she has a good life — or at least a comfortable one. Then, for the second time, June’s child is torn away from her.